Running on Empty: Writing Blogs with Zero Buffer

I had a 4 month buffer on this blog back in November. That's 16 weeks of posts... all scheduled and laid out... And I blew it. I'm now backed against the blog posting wall with no buffer... no posts in my backpocket and... I hate that!

The idea of having a nice fat buffer is... I can relax a bit. I don't have to write a blog every week. If I want to write 3 one week, and none for a few weeks, that works. There is a buffer... and the buffer can absorb the vagaries of my writing inspirations... or lack thereof. And a 4 month buffer is a very healthy buffer... but over the last few months, my attention has been elsewhere. And now the buffer is gone... weep for the little buffer... sigh...

No buffer means I feel the stress of getting a post written and published. No buffer means I have no wiggled room. No buffer means I question whether I even want to continue doing this.

Now... my partner will tell you that all of this stress, anguish and gnashing of teeth is self-imposed. There is no Blog God holding a gun to my head saying... "You must publish a blog every week or... else..." Seriously, there isn't... This blog doesn't even have a tonne of readers who will *gasp* abandon me if I skip a week or two.

But... and you knew there was a "but"... this blog isn't really for others... it's for me (mostly). A place where I can write an express ideas and wrestle with things and get my thoughts out of my head. If someone else benefits from it... bonus!

There is a sweet spot of writing for me... when I have a bunch of posts in the bag... I can write or not write on a particular day and I'm OK. I can focus my writing on other blogs (I have several) and other projects.

It's not that I lack for topics, I have reams and reams of ideas and many, many draft posts that need some polishing and tweaking and research. But the month of April (it is April 2 as I write this) is full. I have tax preparation as Priority #1 for the first two weeks. Oh, and Airbnb cleaning... And then 10 days of working the pulpmill shutdown as Hole Watch (now that is a whole other post!). And then a conference to attend at the end of the month. And there goes April... poof.

So I sit here and write what's front and centre and real. I could skip a post... I could. I've done that in the past. But from experience I know what happens when I skip one post... one turns into two... turns into three... then 10... then 50. Before you know it, a whole year has gone by and I wonder why I am bursting with ideas and no outlet for them.

There is something soothing, comforting, satisfying.. .cathartic? About writing these posts. So I do try to keep at least one post coming out every week. They might not be long. They might not be deep. But they are real and reflect my current state of grumbling anxious panic... "Who the heck let a 4 MONTH buffer slip away...?"

Because let me tell you... it is way easier to post one blog a week as part of a blog post maintenance program, thereby keeping a rolling 4 month buffer... than to try and come up with 4 blog posts in 1 week! The difference between sweeping and snow shoveling... maintenance is always easier than catch-up...

Grumble...

Sweeping vs. Shoveling: The Wisdom of Regular Maintenance

I keep coming back to this lesson in life. In a nutshell, I snow-plough small (and sometimes large) tasks ahead of me until I am faced with a mountain of tasks. All frozen together into this massive ice-mountain.

I stare at it and am so totally immobilized, because at that point, it's hard to even see the individual tasks. It's just this amorphous blob of "stuff to do".

I can't be the only person who does this. And it annoys the heck out of me.

Case in point... I keep our joint finances updated once a week using GnuCash, an Open Source accounting program. It works beautifully.

It takes about 15 minutes a week (give or take) and then a longer spell at the end of the month when I transfer totals into a spreadsheet and produce our monthly financial report.

I know that if I don't do the weekly updates... and push them too far into the future... it's going to get messy, very fast. If I'm trying to catch up on 4 weeks of finances... ugh... it's a massive snow blob! And it takes me hours as I stare at receipts trying to figure out what those cryptic product descriptions are. "What the heck did I buy at Home Depot that day?" In a normal household, this wouldn't be a big deal but since we run a business... I need to know what I bought to see if it's a business expense!

And then there are my personal finances. I might enter my credit card purchases and keep the bank account info up to date every couple of weeks... but... I don't transfer all of that info into my personal financial spreadsheet. Ugh. It's probably all of 2022 that needs to be processed. It's tedious. It's a huge pile of snow-ploughed small tasks. And... I just keep turning away from it... until it's March and tax time is looming.

The thing is... it's easy to hop over the little tasks in life... all of those individual tasks are so small that I can say... "I'll do that later... next week, next month". But I never do. And then I'm facing tax time and... I need to know what I spent last year on various things like website hosting, book purchases, research costs, etc... all of which are tax deductions. Sooo... this is where the pedal hits the metal. I knew this time was coming and I pushed all of those tasks off... and now they have come home to roost.

Our joint finances are usually in great shape for pulling out info for our tax accountant. Yay me!

Personal finances... not such great shape. I've done this repeatedly. Every time, I get annoyed with "Past Me" who didn't do the small steps that would make "Future Me" happy. Nope. And it seems like I forget this lesson. Once tax time is done... I slack off again. It's November and... guess what... my personal finances haven't been updated since... March...

So here's my thought... when I do those monthly financial reports for our joint accounts... I will take 30 min and do my personal financial report as well - transfer all of that monthly info into my spreadsheet. I'm already on a roll from the joint report... so it won't take as much effort... will it?

It's true that regular maintenance takes less time than trying to catch upon several weeks worth of stuff. It takes less work to clean the stove after every meal than to let stuff accumulate there and then you're scrubbing and grumbling and... you get the picture. Same with shoveling the driveway - it takes way less effort to shovel a few inches of snow every couple of hours than to wait until there's a foot of snow on the driveway. Ugh.

Regular maintenance does take some commitment. I'm not sure why this particular task of personal finances is so hard for me. Perhaps it seems less important than the joint finances? Perhaps I don't want to know how much I've spent at Starbucks every month? I'm a little gloomy that it's November and nothing has changed. Although... if I caught up now, that would be better than trying to catch up in March! Right? Right!

Small regular steps... that's the key... you'd think I would have learned and absorbed this by now!